Introducing Pair Programming Support, Draft PRs, and More: Check Out Velocity’s Newest Features

On behalf of the Code Climate team — Happy New Year! We’re excited to kick off 2022 by announcing three brand new and highly-requested features:

• Pair programming support
• Draft PR support
• Updated e-mail and Slack PR links

Pair Programming Support

Many engineering teams, including ours, use pair programming sessions to help increase efficiency and minimize errors, all while engendering a culture of collaboration and knowledge-sharing on their teams.

Pairing creates an opportunity for more junior members of the team to ask questions like, “Why do we do this like that?”, or for more senior programmers to describe different implementation approaches they’ve tried and how they’ve worked out in the past. These discussions help close the experience gap and often lead to a new consensus about the preferred way of doing things.

To this end, we’re excited to announce that one of our most highly requested Velocity features — pair programming support — is now live!

What Does Pair Programming Support Look Like in Velocity?

Pair programming support manifests in three main ways in the platform.

First of all, every metric in the application that takes commit activity into account will now reflect pair programming data. For example, if Hermione (author) and Snape (co-author) write 302 lines of code in a pairing session, both of their PR size metrics will reflect this change. Previously, only Hermione’s PR size metric would be affected.

Secondly, co-authorship is now accounted for in the Team and Developer360 Activity tabs. Before, a purple commit bubble would only show up on Hermione’s line (if she was the author) and not on Snape’s (the co-author), even if they had been coding together. Now, the commit bubbles will show up on both axes of activity. It’s important to note that once the PR is opened, however, only the author’s PR metrics will be affected by future changes.

Finally, for all Velocity customers with integrated Jira instances, pair programming data will display in the Workstreams report when users hover over any commit activity that was co-authored (see below).

Note: If you’re an existing Velocity customer who onboarded before November 2020, your rep will reach out within the next few weeks to let you know when this feature is available. 

Draft PR Support

Draft PRs make it possible for a developer to push his or her work as soon as possible, without unintentionally signaling to a manager that their work is ready to be formally reviewed and/or shipped.

Ever since GitHub launched this functionality in early 2019, Draft PRs have become an integral part of many engineering organizations’ workflows and a highly-requested Velocity feature.

What Does Draft PR Support Look Like in Velocity?

Organizations can now customize when a PR should be considered Ready for Review. There are three options:

• When a Pull Request Review is first requested
• When a Pull Request is created
• When a Pull Request is no longer marked as a draft

Once you’ve configured what your organization defines as ‘Ready for Review,’ all relevant Velocity metrics (Time to First Review, Review Speed, Time to Merge) will reflect this change.

You can also start the clock for the Waiting for Review risk alert by heading to Settings > Data > PR Risks and selecting your preference from the same dropdown menu. 

We hope this new functionality will make it possible for developers to adhere to CI/CD best practices without pinging their teammates prematurely.

Note: Draft PR functionality is only available for GitHub users. 

Updated E-mail and Slack PR Links

Finally, we’ve updated the PR link settings in our e-mail and Slack alerts to route directly to your VCS and not to Velocity (as they did before).

This way, any user with access to the PR — even those without a Velocity seat — can act upon e-mail and Slack alerts.

Get Started

Velocity’s come a long way in a year, and we’re looking forward to delivering many more highly-requested features in 2022.

In the meantime, users can configure their Pair Programming and Draft PR Settings at the respective links, and as always, reach out to our support team if you have any questions.